MediaTek is going through a big branding transition, so in the future we will see more emphasis on the new Helio brand than on the model numbers such as MT6795.

We saw a similar play a few years back when Qualcomm introduced Snapdragon. Intel did the same thing two decades ago with Pentium, followed up by and Core brands replacing the x86 number-only brands. Mediatek told us that Helio X10 replaces the MT6795 and this is the octa-64 bit CPU with eight cores up to 2.2GHz. It also comes with Core Pilot technology and first phones using it are hitting the market right now. The HTC One E9+ should be one of the first smartphone to come with this SoC.

MediaTek is using Helio X for Extreme performance parts and Helio P for Premium Performance. We remember than Johan Lodenius, Corporate Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) at MediaTek, talked to us about this "sweet-spot" market that the Helio P would cover.

The future is bright, as the new Helio part is coming soon in 20nm with a Cortex A72 CPU, with Core Pilot 2.0 technology. There are not a lot of details out there, but the new Helio should be more powerful and more efficient, boasting MiraVision Plus image quality technology as well as a 3rd generation LTE modem with carrier aggregation.

14nm still to expensive, but 20nm is not

A few might wonder why MediaTek didn’t immediately go after 14nm from Samsung / GlobalFoundries or 16nm TSMC SoC but Mohit Bhushan, Vice President and General Manager of Corporate Marketing, US, explained that the manufacturing cost is important to watch out for too. The 14nm node might be the most advanced process on the market, but it is the most expensive too. The other part of the story is that yields of the new manufacturing nods are usually not as good as the more mature nodes such as 28nm, or even 20nm.

Samsung's Exynos 7240 is a little miracle, and being the first mobile 14nm SoC in the market has its own benefits.

Having only a SoC doesn’t help much, as you also need to have an LTE-capable modem in order to become a player in European and US markets. Some parts of Asia still don’t need LTE, but it is becoming more relevant there, too. This goes hand in hand with the future-proof concept, whereby customers want a phone that will last and will get them access to LTE when it becomes available in their countries. There is no doubt that the Exynos 7240 with 14nm, octa-core and DDR4 memory support is quite a nice chip, but what about the modem?

According to industry sources, the Exynos Modem 333 was in development for more than seven years. Samsung has gathered a lot of LTE engineers in San Diego labs and started working on this project. As you can see, it took them years to develop a modem that the company calls Exynos 300 series.

The San Diego labs got the necessary qualification for Samsung's LTE modem in many countries, but we hear that that might be a Galaxy S6 version with a Qualcomm modem inside too. The Cat 6 modem that works together with the new Exynos is 2014 technology. Qualcomm has a Cat 10 modem ready, as this is the latest and greatest standard shipping to customers. It is called Qualcomm Gobi 9x45 and it is based on the second-generation 20nm node. The Qualcomm modem offers up to 450Mbps Downlink 3x Carrier Aggregation and up to 100Mbps Uplink 2x Carrier Aggregation, and can be considered the most advanced modem around.

The fact that the Exynos 300 series modem was developed in San Diego is no surprise. San Diego is the headquarters of Qualcomm and one can imagine that most of the Exynos LTE modem people came from Qualcomm.

Last week at the Mobile World Congress 2015 Qualcomm demonstrated Cat 11 modem with 600Mbit download speeds, while the Exynos 300 series modem can deal with LTE Category 6 download speeds of up to 300Mbps. This is not something you could see at the Galaxy 6 press event, and definitely not something that Samsung wants advertised.

There is no doubt that the Samsung 300 series modem with Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge will do just fine, especially considering that at best most world LTE provides support Cat 4 LTE speeds up to 150Mbps, and end customers usualy cannot come close to these speeds. Still it won't be the world's best modem with support for the latest standards.

We found out one rather interesting story at the Mobile World Congress and it sheds more light on Samsung's decision to use Exynos SoCs for most markets instead of Qualcomm's Snapdragon 810.

It turns out that the Exynos 7240 was manufactured in 14nm and that going with octa-core with four Cortex-A57 and four Cortex-A53 was an incredibly huge risk. Samsung had a nice run with 20nm parts for the Galaxy Note 4 that used an in-house Exynos 5433 SoC in many markets. This was the world's first Android based 20nm SoC that used Cortex-A57 and Cortex-A53 cores. Samsung used 20nm Exynos 5433 for some markets, while most other markets like the US were covered by the Snapdragon 805 with a Cat 6 LTE modem.

We also learned that Snapdragon 810 will also ship in some Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge phones because of its modem technology advantage over Samsung's Exynos. It all depends on the market.

Many industry figures expected that Samsung would announce two versions of the Galaxy S6, one with Exynos for a few small markets, and the other version for most of the world with Snapdragon 810.

What happened is that 14nm yields for Exynos 7240 were significantly better than Samsung or anyone else in the industry expected. This includes Qualcomm, Intel, TSMC - you name it - and people still cannot believe that Samsung recovered so well from disastrous 20nm yields in its fabs. This is the reason why Samsung decided that most of its Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge should ship with Exynos and a smaller number with Snapdragon 810 SoCs.

The 14nm Exynos 7240 uses Cortex-A57 and Cortex-A53 cores and delivers a slight increase in speed that got up from 1.9GHz with Exynos 5433 to 2.1GHz for A57 cores and from 1.3GHz to 1.5GHz on A53 cores. At the same time 14nm means that Samsung needs less power to run the chip, while reaping more performance.

So despite the fact that Samsung is a huge and important player, they were essentially lucky with Exynos 7240 its good yields on 14nm. Qualcomm is working hard to release Snapdragon 820 and challenge Samsung's new chip. The fact that Samsung relies on the plain Cortex design from ARM will probably cost it leadership in the near future, as in 2015 some of the big boys have custom, in-house CPU cores.

We remembered that Nvidia's Jen-Hsung Huang said that the company could not get into Apple or Samsung and that they could only play in other market niches, and guess what - he was right about that. Bottom line - Apple, Qualcomm and Nvidia do custom cores, while Samsung, Hisilicon and MediaTek still rely on reference ARM cores.

14nm delivers substantial gains

On February 14, Samsung announced that its new 14nm Exynos 7 Octa processor entered a volume production. When compared to Samsung’s planar 20nm technology, this new process enables up to 20 percent higher performance, 35 percent lower power consumption and an overall productivity gain of 30 percent. Bear in mind that the Galaxy S5 has a 28nm Snapdragon 801, not a 20nm Exynos, and that the performance and efficiency gap should be even wider.

T-Mobile Austria was one of the few places helped us find out a bit more about the processor. There were no big surprises. The site lists it as Exynos 7420 (14nm) (64-bit, A57 2.1G Quad + A53 1.5G Quad). In a sense the basic specification and the choice of cores puts this CPU very close to the Snapdragon 810 processor, but it's a different story in the GPU and modem department.

The Snapdragon 810 also supports native 64-bit and has four Cortex-A57 cores at 2.0GHz and four Cortex-A53 cores at 1.5GHz, but it is a planar 20nm chip. This means that head-to-head the Exynos 7420 should end up faster, while at the same time delivering superior battery life. We have to wait for some real-world tests to see the efficiency gains in action, but initial benchmarks look very promising indeed. Another thing to consider is throttling. The Snapdragon 810 suffers from aggressive throttling on the LG Flex 2, but thanks to the more advanced process, the Exynos should cope with extended load somewhat better. While the official max clock is just 100MHz on the Exynos, the processor should be able to sustain it for much longer periods of time.

Exynos 7420 and in-house Cat 6 modem

Perhaps the most surprising part of the new platform is the modem. Samsung hasn’t gone on record about the modem, but according Sammobile it should be using model SS333, or Exynos Modem 333, an in-house modem. Samsung only tells the press that it is using a Cat. 6 LTE modem.

This modem can achieve speeds of 300Mbits, making it more than capable of offering a great internet experience. Cat 6 enables the Galaxy S6 to connect to two spectrums at once, aggregating both to give faster download speeds. The iPhone 6 supports LTE Category 4, offering up to 150Mbps downlink data rates and 50Mbps uplink speeds.

Qualcomm has an LTE Cat.10 capable modem to offer up to 450 Mbps downlink via 3x carrier aggregation and up to 100Mbps uplink using 2x aggregation, but most carriers simply don’t have the infrastructure to support it, at least not yet.

There is no doubt that from the hardware perspective the Galaxy S6 has the most advanced processor in the market, leaning heavily on using the world's first mobile 14nm SoC and reaping many advantages of this new process, while Qualcomm and the rest of the competition just started 20nm manufacturing and sales. That said, 2015 will be interesting year to watch in the mobile space, as FinFET becomes an option for high end SoCs and 28nm becomes even cheaper, allowing manufacturers to use more powerful chips in entry level devices.

As for 20nm, it will still be around, but with limited capacity and higher costs than 28nm, it does not have much of a future.

Recently Samsung announced that serial production of its new 14nm SoC has already commenced. The new part is going to end up in Samsung Galaxy S6 and a few other devices.

This happens less than two quarters after Intel started production of Broadwell-Y 14nm CPUs, its first 14nm volume manufactured part.

Intel has yet to introduce mobile phone and tablet SoC based on Braswell / Airmont, on the new 14nm manufacturing process, and Intel has the best manufacturing fabs in the world. A new manufacturing process like 14nm costs billions of dollars to deploy, and Intel is the only company that can do it on its own.

The rest of the market needs TSMC, GlobalFoundries and other foundries to handle manufacturing for their SoC/GPU/CPU designs. The fact that TSMC and GlobalFoundries could not get 20nm ready for more than two years really hampered innovation. Samsung had some of its own Exynox SoCs in 20nm, but this was far from being significant in the big scheme of things.

The transition from 28nm to 20nm manufacturing should result in a 20-percent performance increase and 35-percent less battery drain, but this process came very late. Transistors are simply smaller and need less power to work.

The GPU industry will skip 20nm simply as yields were horrible with high performance parts such as GPUs. Apple had better luck with 20nm A8 SoC that ended up performing well in tens of millions phones and tablets around the world, but only in very late 2014. The 20nm manufacturing process was supposed to happen at least a year earlier, but it got delayed due to yield-related problems.

The fact that Samsung goes 14nm before Apple and even before Intel in SoC phone space is a big statement. Samsung got good 14nm yields, as it is confident enough trusts it with its flagship Samsung Galaxy S6 phone. This means that it should be able to produce millions of Galaxy 6 phones based on 14nm Exynos 7420 SoC.

The 14nm process should boost performance and reduce power consumption, but since 20nm was almost nonexistent for Android phones in 2014, we will compare this process with 28nm SoCs like the Snapdragon 801.

Samsung’s 14nm SoC could end up close to 40 percent faster compared to 28nm SoCs and could enable battery life that is close to 50 percent better. This is a huge leap forward and currently Samsung will be the only beneficiary to this technology. The advantages are obvious - you don't need a 3000mAh battery on a flagship phone based on 14nm silicon, they can be lighter and thinner.

For years Samsung had the same hardware like all the rest of the high end market. Qualcomm was the king until 2015 with its high end SoCs. Samsung Galaxy 5, HTC One M8 and LG G3 all had Snapdragon 801 and there well little difference between the performance that could mostly be attributed to Android customisations like Samsung TouchWiz, HTC Sense or LG's own interface.

This time Samsung can have better SoC, while it remains to be seen if Samsung will use Apple’s approach and still decide to use Qualcomm's LTE external modem chip. Qualcomm, MediaTek and companies that became (were) irrelevant to phones like Nvidia and Intel should have their 14nm / 16nm SoCs in 2016.

This doesn’t mean that Apple and Samsung will get to 10nm next year, as this is simply not realistic, but 14nm might give Samsung an edge. We expect the first phone SoCs based on 10nm in 2017 at best. Samsung has to play the software card well, as TouchWiz was one of the big complaints for its phones.

The fact that LG wants to make its own SoC means that if you want to remain in the top league, you will have to make your own SoC like Apple, and Samsung. The question remains - does the investment in design and manufacturing of a SoC pay off? It is a huge risk for anyone, and getting well designed and safe chips from companies like Qualcomm definitely saves you a lot of money. Let’s see how good will Exynos 7420 really be against Snapdragon 810 – 20nm, and the rest of the competition.

Nvidia had a record Q4 and record financial year but tanking Tegra did not really help.

According to Nvidia Chief Financial Officer Tegra sales shrunk 15 percent from the financial Q4 2014 a year ago.C olette Kress, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer at Nvidia claimed the reason was that "smartphone and tablet designs reached the end of their product life cycle."

However there is a new trend, the revenue increased on the auto infotainment systems and Colette said that investors that this market more than doubled. Nvidia saw increase in earnings from Shield devices too, but did not say much more about it.

It looks like Tegra's future is under a car's bonnet. Nvidia reported better than 80 percent growth during the year. More than 7.5 million cars with Nvidia technology are now on the road and a year ago Nvidia had only 4.7 million cars. This is where most of Tegra money was coming from.

Nvidia has introduced Nvidia Drive. NVIDIA Drive is the first car computing platform, using advances in deep learning and there is no doubt that this segment will become big in the months to come. We will tell you more about the Drive later, but the technology looks great and will help the self-driving car's future. Nvidia Drive can use data from inexpensive cameras and help auto vendors to make a self-driving car. This is cheaper than with Lidar Light Detection and ranging rotating device that sits on top of the self-driving cars.

Nvidia Drive and the commitment to automotive makes sense is that margins are probably much bigger than in the overcrowded phone and tablet market. The car industry can provide users for Nvidia and the technology inside of the car is just a small fraction of the total price. We see an infotainment becoming a standard option for most manufacturers and more cars. Apparently people will want to connect their phone to their infotainment and play Spotify music. Maybe in the future you could use your LTE connected car and stream Netflix to the rear seats as well, this is what we expect from the future. This is the sort of thing that Tegra eats for breakfast.

Nvidia plans a new product announcement on the second day of MWC 2015 and it has sent invitations to press outlets for an event scheduled for the 3rd of March 2015.

The only catch is that Nvidia event is actually on the other side of the globe, in San Francisco, and is a part of another event called Games Developers Conference 2015, not MWC 2015.

Nvidia teases that Made to Game event is about something that was "5 years in the making" and that will redefine the future of gaming. We kind of heard such bold announcements before, but since we don’t know what this might be, we cannot offer any insight. We also heard that G-sync would kill AMD, and that didn't happen either, not even close.

We do know that Nvidia is actively working on virtual reality technology, and we would not be surprised to see some form of Tegra-powered product on the stage (since the Tegra fits the "5 years in the making" statement).

The fact that Nvidia wants Android-focused press outlets to attend the event suggests we are looking at an Android device, or Shield device to be more precise. It's not the new Titan based on a GM200-series GPU. Titan II was not five years in making, so it has to be something different. [Tegra X1 Shield Tablet, Shield Portable, or maybe Shield VR, take your pick and head down to the comment section. Ed]

Hynix is a big name in the memory industry, and since phones are becoming small, yet quite powerful computers, it doesn’t come as a surprise that new memory standards are making their way to flagship phones.

Hynix has confirmed that it is the first company to ship LP DDR4 memory that ended up in a commercial smartphone, as we predicted a few months back.

Hynix is shipping 8Gb LPDDR4 (Low Power Double Data Rate 4) that is used in the LG G Flex 2 phone. This phone was announced at CES 2015 back in January, but we still haven’t seen it shipping to end-customers.

The 20nm LPDDR4 memory has double the transfer rate that increased from 1600Mbps with LPDDR3 to 3200Mbps with LPDDR4. At the same time LPDDR4 needs 1.1V, which is 0.1V less than what you need with LPDDR3 at 1.2V. It's not a lot, but it matters.

We are sure that some other flagship phones that will be introduce on March 1 at the Mobile World Congress 2015 will also come with LPDDR4 support. The Snapdragon 810 does support this memory interface and not only does it it doubles the data rate throughput, it also results in less power consumption for the whole phone.

Research firm IHS predicts that 36 percent of premium smartphones might end up using LPDDR4 next year. We are sure that a lot of premium phones will end up with LPDDR4 this year, and we also hope that USB 3.0, also part of the Snapdragon 810 chip specification, will finally make its way to next-generation flagship smartphones that are coming in less than a month.

It doesn’t come as a surprise that Nvidia is working on a new iteration of the Shield tablet.

Nvidia announced its Tegra X1 processor a while ago, and the chip leaves most of the competition in the dust, at least according to the first benchmarks that we saw in January.

The new tablet replaces the quite unique Tegra Shield tablet, a tablet that offers speedy Android updates, plain Android experience, support for Shield gaming hub and a microSD card slot, all at a relatively good price.

Nvidia is working on a successor that is supposed to launch within a couple of months. We don’t have any better date than that, but we do know that it will come soon. We expect announcement latest at the GPU technology conference scheduled for March 17th if not earlier. The same sources told us about the existence of the original Shield tablet months before launch.

Let's not forget that Tegra X1 is based on an octa-core 64-bit ARM CPU, with four Cortex-A57 2MB L2 cores and another four Cortex-A53 512KB L2 cores. Tegra X1 supports H.265, VP9 4K 60 fps Video 4k H.265, 4k VP9, 4k H.264 - pretty much all codecs that matter and that they will matter for the 4K in the future.

With display support up to 4K x 2K @60 Hz or 1080p @120 Hz HDMI 2.0 60 fps, HDCP 2.2 we expect the Tegra X1 based Shield might shape up to be a great tablet for niche users looking for high performance.

We don’t know much specs, but we think that an 8-inch form factor makes sense and an LTE version will be coming, too.

We want to make sure that you realize that 20nm GPUs won’t be coming at all. Despite the fact that Nvidia, Qualcomm, Samsung and Apple are doing 20nm SoCs, there won’t be any 20nm GPUs.

From what we know AMD and Nvidia won’t be releasing 20nm GPUs ever, as the yields are so bad that it would not make any sense to manufacture them. It is not economically viable to replace 28nm production with 20nm.

This means the real next big thing technology will be coming with 16nm / 14nm FinFET from TSMC and GlobalFoundries / Samsung respectively, but we know that AMD is working on Caribbean Islands and Fiji as well, while Nvidia has been working on its new chip too.

This doesn’t mean that you cannot pull a small miracle in 28nm, as Nvidia did that back in September 2014 with Maxwell and proved that you can make a big difference with optimization on the same manufacturing process, in case when the new node is not an option.

Despite the lack of 20nm chips we still think that next gen Nvidia and AMD chips bring some innovations and make you want to upgrade in order to buy it to play the latest games on FreeSync or G-Sync monitors, or in 4K/UHD resolutions.